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If you ever wondered who’s the most powerful person in the sylvan suburbs of the Lower Hudson Valley, I’ve got a candidate.

It was made plain to me the day after Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino delivered his State of the Country address.

In his speech, Astorino blasted the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s micromanagement of an out-of-court settlement that calls for the county to build 750 affordable-housing units in 31 communities — and market the homes to minorities.

Astorino used hyperbolically charged language to condemn his federal adversaries, who have accused the county of dragging its feet. He said HUD was a “Goliath,” a bureaucratic bully that was “overreaching” to the point of threatening to “turn the American dream upside down.”

Standing up to the feds, Astorino said, isn’t easy. But he pledged he would not cave to the bureaucrats whose intention was to go beyond the tenets of the agreement to make a national example of Westchester in a “grand experiment.”

The perception was that the county executive had drawn a line in the sand. And then — wham. Less than 24 hours later, the prime-time tough talk was tempered and the line of defiance was quietly moved back a few paces.

The catalyst was U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, whose aggressive prosecutions of criminal miscreants in the Southern District — many of them greedy politicians — have earned him a special sobriquet. Bharara is the sheriff of Main Street.

And he made that clear to Astorino.

In a pointed letter, Bharara warned the county executive that he would seek a contempt ruling against him if he didn’t comply with a court decision that he had violated a key piece of the housing settlement. Since taking office in 2010, Astorino has had many legal battles with HUD and one of those fights was over a piece of legislation called “source of income.”

Simply put, the bill says that landlords cannot deny housing to someone on the grounds that his or her income is derived from government benefits such as Social Security.

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The Democratic-controlled Board of Legislators passed the source of income legislation and Astorino vetoed it. This set off a series of legal battles, which he ultimately lost in federal appeals court.

As a result, Astorino twice asked the legislators to reintroduce the bill.

But Bharara said he needed to go further than that. Asserting that Astorino’s responsibility was to “promote” the legislation, he ordered him to personally reintroduce the bill with a letter stating his intention to sign it.

Bharara’s warning was dated April 19, but Astorino didn’t heed it until the day after his April 21 address.

His detractors gloated. Board Chairman Ken Jenkins, a staunch nemesis, said Astorino’s “rhetoric of last evening” had changed to a “beautiful day of understanding.” Others contended he folded like a cheap suit.

Astorino is anything but stupid. Facing re-election this fall, he’s playing a calculated game in fighting the feds’ challenge against home rule. Though this may resonate with a lot of voters, one thing he cannot afford to do is let this housing controversy blow up into an expensive Yonkers-like fiasco — and he knows it. The last thing he wants is for his name to become synonymous with Hank Spallone, the late former mayor of Yonkers who was at the forefront of fighting a federal desegregation order brought against the city.

Bharara seems to have been the convincer in this round. He reminded Astorino that he’s the law in these parts.

More than a few believe, however, that the law has been selective when it comes to the U.S. Department of Justice’s failure in going after crooked Wall Street bankers — an assessment that only solidified when Attorney General Eric Holder all but said recently that the banks were too big to prosecute.

The criticism on this point annoys Bharara, who once said in a New Yorker article that the criticism came from “ideologues.”

“Do we look like we’re afraid to prosecute anyone?” he asked in exasperation.

Bharara certainly is not timid on public corruption. In early 2011, when he announced the indictment of Vinnie Leibell, the state senator from Putnam who was once considered the third-most powerful figure in the Legislature, Bharara declared, “We will continue to bring appropriate cases until every politician understands that elected office is a privilege, not a right, that elected officials are there to serve the public, not themselves.”

On that score, he has kept his promise. He has become a ubiquitous figure with a penchant for pithy sound bites, frequently prefacing his news conferences with the phrase, “It’s a sad day when …”

Astorino said his HUD adversaries were “Washington bureaucrats, who you will never see or meet.”